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I had a perfectly glorious weekend in Virginia. After seeing an excellent production of Macbeth the night before on the only recreation of Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse in the world, we had to get up quite early since the hotel only served breakfast till 9 a.m. even on a Saturday, which left us with two hours before a tour of the theater tour at 11. So we went to the Woodrow Wilson birthplace and museum, one of the few tourist attractions open at that hour and something I doubt we would ever have visited had we not had that block of time. It was fascinating, as my education about Wilson extended only to World War I and the League of Nations...I knew nothing about his childhood and very little about his career as a scholar.

From there we went back to Blackfriars and were given the tour by the actor who played Banquo - a University of Delaware professor and excellent tour guide as well as an excellent actor. It's always great fun to see the costumes and props up close, and we also got to see how "Hell" and "Heaven" work - the trap doors in the floor of the stage and the ceiling of the theater. And we got to stand on the stage and see up close the painting, reminiscent of that in London's Globe, that creates the fake marble and highly decorated tapestries.

After walking around the stage we drove into Shenandoah National Park and drove the entire length of Skyline Drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains, where we saw gorgeous views only slightly obscured by haze. While hiking to the Bearfence Mountain summit, from which there is a 360-degree view, there was a deer not five yards from us in the woods, and later, in a stretch of woods past the Big Meadows visitor center, there was a black bear with two cubs in the trees! This is the first time I have ever successfully taken a photo of a bear so close, though I dared not get close enough to get pictures of the cubs. There were more deer with fawns on this stretch of road, so it must be declared an extremely successful day in the mountains.

Trek BBS Today

Below are some of the topics currently being discussed at the Trek BBS:

Shatner Ad A Marketing Test?An ad featuring Kirk that aired in the CBS Television City Research Center in the Las Vegas MGM hotel was suggested to be a tool to judge fan interest in an appearance by William Shatner (Kirk) on Star Trek: Enterprise, since the actor and UPN were still in negotiations which never came to fruition.

Hertzler Returns To 'Enterprise'J. G. Hertzler (Martok) revealed that he was shooting an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which he played a Klingon captain as part of the Augments arc starring Brent Spiner (Data).

Las Vegas Convention ReportDozens of Star Trek actors and crew descended upon the annual Las Vegas Star Trek Convention at the Las Vegas Hilton, discussing everything from their concerns about Enterprise's future to their hopes for another Star Trek feature film.

Please vote in our new poll on who you really want to see roast Shatner well on Comedy Central next weekend!

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Happy Birthday!

Saturday, August 12th is the birthday of Jane Wyatt, who played Spock's mother Amanda on the original series and in the films, Walter "Matt" Jefferies, who designed the Jefferies Tubes, and Catherine Hicks, who played Dr. Gillian Taylor in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; Monday, August 14th is the birthday of Enterprise co-creator Brannon Braga; and Thursday, August 17th is the birthday of Harve Bennett, the executive producer of several of the original series Star Trek movies.